But Syriously, Folks

I’m pleased to see, from comments and email, that folks are interested in — or at least curious about — the Fathers of the Syriac tradition. There’s been renewed interest in these men in recent years, and it’s long overdue. The old patristics manuals tended to divide the Fathers into Greek and Latin (meaning east and west) and then lump the Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian Fathers in, almost as an afterthought, with the Greeks. But they don’t quite fit there.

The Syriac Fathers were the founders of a different Christian culture with its own literary and theological style. They used neither Greek nor Latin, but rather Syriac, which is the dialect of Aramaic used in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey). They spoke the language of Jesus, and their earliest writers were in close conversation with the rabbis of Babylonian Judaism. Indeed, they engaged in controversy with the rabbis. The brilliant and prolific modern rabbi Jacob Neusner finds in St. Aphrahat, for example, a model — “remarkable and exemplary” — for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Aphrahat is, says Rabbi Neusner, “an enduring voice of civility and rationality amid the cacaphony of mutual disesteem.” The Syriac Fathers preserved a semitic style of Christianity that likely was similar in many ways to the Church’s founding generation.

With the Nestorian schism in the fifth century, many disaffected Christians took refuge in the Persian East, which was beyond the political influence of Byzantium. For centuries, the East Syrians went their way, having little contact with the West, but sending missions to China and India. Along the centuries, some of these churches returned to communion with the west. And, as if to prove my recurring point that “the Fathers are news”: Rome’s ecumenical dialogue with the Syriac churches has borne more fruit than any other. In 1994, Pope John Paul II signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, essentially resolving “the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church” — in other words, clearing up the Nestorian troubles, once and for all. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity went a step further and approved the sharing of Communion between the (Catholic) Chaldean Church and the (so-called Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East.

The following book would also be relevant to those interested in Syriac Christianity:
EAST OF THE EUPHRATES: EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA
by T.V. Philip, Published by ISPCK

Content Summary:
While Paul and other missionaries were converting Greeks, Romans and the barbarian tribes in the west, there was equally a movement of Christianity to the East – Edessa, Persia, Arabia, Central Asia, China and India. Though the evidence of the presence of Christianity in some of the South East and East Asian countries is scanty and fragmentary, there is sufficient evidence to show that Christianity was present in Ceylon, Burma, Indonesia and Korea before the arrival of the western missionaries. It is a surprise to many people to learn that there was a large and widespread Christian community throughout the whole of Central Asia and that such countries as Afghanistan and Tibet which are considered today as lands closed to Christianity were once centres of Christian activity. This book is an introduction to the exciting and fascinating story of the movement of the gospel in Asian lands, east of the Euphrates. It explores the missionary impulses of the early Asian Christian communities and the theology that motivated them. It discusses the reason for its decline by AD 1500, after a millennium and a half of heroic efforts and phenomenal growth.